European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
The deadline for the ECAI Workshops is approaching.
We want to make
ECAI 2000 in Berlin, August, 20-25
a very special conference in the year 2000. We want to bring together
researchers and developers from academy and industry in order to
present the state of the art in AI both in research and in
applications.
A very important part in this program are the workshops:
Thus, if you have an interesting topic, please contact
other people and submit a proposal for your workshop!
If you need more information about ECAI:
http://www.ecai2000.hu-berlin.de/
We hope to meet you in Berlin in August 2000.
Best regards,
Hans-Dieter Burkhard from the ECAI Organizing Committee
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CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
The ECAI 2000 Program Committee invites proposals for workshops to be
held in conjunction with the conference. The workshops will be held on
21-22 August 2000, immediately prior to the start of the main
conference.
IMPORTANT DATES
1 Nov 1999 Deadline for proposals
1 Dec 1999 Notification of acceptance
15 Dec 1999 Deadline for workshop summaries
7 Jan 2000 Publication of ECAI 2000 workshop programme
15 June 2000 Camera-ready workshop notes and other information
21-22 Aug 2000 Workshops at ECAI 2000
ECAI workshops
To encourage interaction, the workshops will be kept small, preferably
under 30 participants and certainly under 40. Attendance should be
limited to active participants only. Workshops are intended to be
genuinely interactive events and not mini-conferences. Thus, although
the format of workshop presentations are to be determined by their
organizers, ample time should be allotted for general discussion.
Workshops can vary in length, but most will last a full day.
Attendees at workshops must also register for the main ECAI 2000
conference.
How to propose a workshop
Proposals for workshops should be two to three pages in length
and should contain:
* A brief technical description of the specific
technical issues that the workshop will address.
* The reasons why the workshop is of interest this time.
* The names, postal address, phone and fax numbers and
email addresses of the Workshop Organizing Committee,
which should consist of at least three people
knowledgeable in the field but not all at the same institution.
* The name of one member of the Workshop Organizing
Committee who is designated the contact person.
* A list of previously-organized related workshops by
any of the Workshop Organizing Committee, although
previous experience with similar workshops is not required.
This is to help the Workshop Coordinator putting
the workshop in context.
* If possible, a list of potential attendees in case
the proposal of the workshop being accepted.
* A schedule for organizing the workshop and a preliminary agenda.
* A summary of the intended workshop Call for Participation,
showing how the organizers will encourage a workshop,
rather than a mini-conference, atmosphere.
* A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any
special room requirements.
Proposers are encouraged to send their draft proposal to the
potential participants for comments before submission.
Submission procedure
Proposals should be submitted electronically (in ascii,
UNIX compatible postscript or rtf) to the ECAI 2000 Workshop
Coordinator, Marie-Odile Cordier, at the following address:
Address for submission
Marie-Odile Cordier
ECAI 2000 Workshop Coordinator IRISA
Campus universitaire de Beaulieu
35042 Rennes Cedex
France
Email: ecai2000wsirisa.fr
Tel: +33 2 99 84 73 14 Fax: +33 2 99 84 71 71
The deadline for receipt of proposals is 1 November, 1999.
For other important dates, see the table above.
Additional information
Workshop organizers will be responsible for:
* Producing and distributing a Call for Participation
in the workshop, open to all members of the AI community.
The Call for Participation should make clear that all
workshop participants are expected to register for
the main ECAI 2000 conference and that the number
of participants is limited. It should also make
clear the process by which the Workshop Organizing
Committee will select the participants (for example,
by reviewing submitted papers).
* Reviewing requests to participate in the workshop
and selecting the participants.
* The production of camera-ready copy for the workshop
notes in accordance with guidelines supplied by the
Workshop Coordinator.
* Providing a provisional list of workshop participants.
* Arranging for a short report on the workshop to be
presented to the main conference if required.
ECCAI encourages the production of publications based on the
workshops, but the ECCAI and ECAI 2000 names cannot be used on such
publications without prior permission being given. Additional and
more detailed information can be found under http://www.ecai2000.hu-berlin.de
In case of any disagreement over procedures or arrangements, the ECAI
2000 Organizing Committee Chair will have final authority. The ECAI
2000 Organizing Committee reserves the right to cancel any workshop if
deadlines are missed, or if the number of registered attendees is too
low to support the costs related to organizing and running the
workshop.

CALL FOR PAPERS:
The pragmatics of crisis
We intend to propose a panel on the Pragmatics of Crisis at the 7th
International Pragmatics Conference in Budapest, Hungary (9-14 July
2000). Below you will find a brief outline of the panel theme. If you
are interested in contributing a paper, please contact Geert Jacobs
(geert.jacobsufsia.ac.be) or Per-Anders Forstorp
(forstorpnada.kth.se) or send them a one-page abstract no later than
October 27th.
Check the IPrA home page for more details about the conference at
http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/
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PRAGMATICS OF CRISIS
Within the domain of institutional and professional discourse, as well
as in the analysis of media discourse, crisis communication has
recently received a lot of attention. The public, professional and
everyday orientation towards socio-cultural and political events being
described with the notions and rhetorics of "risk",
"fear", "crisis", "trust", "responsibility"
and "security" highlights a perennial and contemporary concern
with the sociocultural management of crisis (cf. Beck, Giddens
Luhmann).
This panel will in particular focus on the salient communicative and
discursive aspects of crisis communication in business organizations
and government agencies, such as the analysis of (the combination of)
form, content, dynamics and function of the interaction, management
and maintenance of critical events. Attempts at linking such
approaches to the socio-theoretical and political concerns connected
to the understanding of crisis, will be encouraged. Our aim is to
address the options for a broader understanding (pragmatics) of these
phenomena.
Contributions to the panel should be based on empirical analyses of
various aspects of crisis events taken from suggested contexts, for
instance: the management of internal and external emergency responses;
the rhetoric of product recall advertising; communication with and
within emergency rescue centers; media representations and coverage of
crisis events; intertextuality of discourses and contexts of crisis
management; interactions with various forms of expertise and
(secondary) victims; processes of victimization and blame allocation;
strategies for coping with demands for empathy and action, etc.
The panel proposes to bring together for the first time various
perspectives on the pragmatics of crisis, analytical approaches and
methods such as CA, rhetorics, ethnography of communication,
pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, linguistics and other areas
of discourse analysis. The scope of analytical perspectives will also
enable us to address questions concerning methods of inquiry and
investigation, as well as communicative and ethical issues connected
to the role as a researcher/vulture in crisis events.
==============================================
Geert Jacobs
Dept of Language and Communication
UFSIA -UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP
Prinsstraat 13
B-2000 Antwerp
Belgium
tel. + 32 3 220 41 39
e-mail: geert.jacobsufsia.ac.be
Per-Anders Forstorp
Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science
Royal Institute of Technology
SE-100 44 Stockholm
SWEDEN
tel. +45 8 7906680
e-mail: forstorpnada.kth.se